A gazetteer of the Yuan capital Dadu, forerunner of Beijing, by the scholar Xiong Mengxiang. It survives only in fragments quoted in later compilations. One of them gives the hierarchy of the city’s streets: great streets and small streets of fixed widths, and the hundreds of narrow lanes between them that Beijing still calls hutong.
Khubilai Khan began his new capital in 1267 on open ground north-east of the old Jin city. It was planned from the start, by Liu Bingzhong and others, in open homage to the Kaogong ji: a walled rectangle with the palace on the central axis, the ancestral temple to the east and the altar of soil and grain to the west, and the great market north of the palace by the lake. Within the wall the space between the main streets was divided by narrow east–west lanes, and houses were built along them on long, south-facing lots.
Xiong Mengxiang, who lived in Dadu under the later Yuan, described the city, its offices, customs and products. His book was lost as a whole, and it is known from passages copied into the great Ming encyclopaedia. The passage on streets gives the great streets as twenty-four paces (bu) wide and the small streets as twelve, and counts several hundred fire-lanes (huoxiang) and a few dozen through-lanes (hutong). The regular spacing of the east–west lanes of old Beijing, about 70–80 m apart, is the physical trace of that plan.
The book, part by part
I Streets and lanes
Great streets 24 bu wide and small streets 12 bu; the lanes (huoxiang and hutong) between them.